Busy bear season in Banff saw up to two dozen calls a day

Colette Derworiz, Calgary Herald08.14.2014

A young female grizzly, now tagged as No. 148, rests at the Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course in Banff National Park. Park officials have been kept on their toes keeping young bears away from human facilities. (Leah Hennel/Calgary Herald)Leah Hennel
/ Calgary Herald

A young female grizzly, now tagged as No. 148, feeds near the Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course in Banff National Park. Officials say the bear has been involved in several bluff charges toward visitors or parks staff. (Leah Hennel/Calgary Herald)Leah Hennel
/ Calgary Herald

BANFF — At the height of this year’s busy bear season in the mountain parks, resource conservation officers in Banff were responding to as many as 24 calls in a single day.

From mid-April to early July, wildlife officers were going non-stop during daylight hours to deal with grizzly and black bears in the so-called ‘no-go’ zones: the Banff townsite, campgrounds and along the highways.

“It was just a phenomenal amount of bear activity,” said Steve Michel, a human-wildlife conflict specialist with Banff National Park. “Once bears emerge on the landscape, we deal with them every day.

“It might be one or two occurrences a day with bears on the landscape and sometimes you have two dozen.”

Michel’s counterpart in Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay saw a similar situation as bears frequented the Lake Louise townsite and foraged along the roadways in the other two mountain parks.

“We had a lot of activity in parts of the park that we hadn’t had before,” said Brianna Burley. “Kootenay park, for example, really picked up for us because we had that female (grizzly) show up there with two cubs.

“Once Kootenay started, we were bears constant — straight for 16 hours a day for six weeks — up until the July long weekend.”

It led to one of the busiest bear seasons in recent memory.

With tens of thousands of visitors in the parks each day, officers were run off their feet making sure there were no major conflicts between people and any wildlife, including bears, elk, deer and others.

In the Banff field unit alone, there have already been 835 human-wildlife conflict occurrences — a 33 per cent increase over 2013, which was the busiest year ever for the officers. Another 486 incidents have taken place in Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay.

It includes everything from elk in the townsite to a bear bluff charging a visitor.

Officials aren’t able to break out exactly how many of those cases involved bears, but Michel said he suspects a significant amount of the increase in Banff is related to this year’s busy bear season.

Both he and Burley said there were several reasons for the increased activity.

“We had a lot more lower elevation bears for a longer period of time throughout the spring,” said Burley, who has been with parks for 10 years. “We also seemed to have a lot of young grizzly bears around this year, which presented different challenges for us. They’re just younger and a bit more impressionable and they require a bit more management from us to try to keep them on the right track.

“Spring for me felt busier for a longer period of time. More sustained. I can’t actually remember a season quite like this in my memory.”

Michel added that it took a long time for green up to occur.

“It was just a really, really bad late winter and then a really long, cold spring that just went on forever so we had a ton of snow on the ground,” he said. “It melted early enough on the valley bottoms and greened up and provided some foraging opportunity for bears but you only had to move up a couple hundred metres in elevation and it was totally snow-clogged, right into June.

“So it was just this incredibly long period of time that bears were concentrated at low elevations.”

Combined with the spring wildlife activities such as mating season and elk calving season, it led to some extremely busy days for staff.

“We have lots and lots of issues around the Banff townsite,” said Michel, noting there are some young Banff bears on their own for their first time that continue to keep them on their toes.

Those bears — including No. 144 and No. 148 — are still hanging around.

“These young bears have a very low confidence in terms of their place in the bear world,” he said. “They have a tendency to want to stay close to human facilities so we’re still seeing that — even though bears have been able to explore upper elevations for quite awhile now.”

No. 144, a three-and-a-half year old male, often runs for cover, but a bear believed to be his sister will puff out her chest to exert some dominance.

“No. 148 seems to have a lot less comfort with people getting close to her,” said Michel, noting she’s been involved in up to a dozen small-scale bluff charges toward either visitors or parks staff.

As a result, conservation officers regularly haze her and other bears out of popular areas such as the townsite, campgrounds and Banff Springs golf course by making noise such as clapping or yelling.

Burley said they are dealing with the same kind of behaviour from No. 142, a female around the same age, near Lake Louise.

“It’s a bit of a challenge when it’s in the townsite,” she said. “She bluff charged a person who was bringing in his groceries one night.

“You aren’t carrying your bear spray when you are popping out of your car and trying to bring in your groceries.”

The challenges could lead to some operational changes in future years, although there won’t be time to sit down and consider how until the bears head into their dens for the winter season later this fall.

For now, Burley said they are still steady with bear calls throughout the day, “but not crazy like we were at the start.”

The next challenge is this year’s berry crop, an important food source for bears, which looks poor at the lower elevations.

It’s not expected to be a problem for now, but could lead to another busy season.

“If they can’t find food, they’re going to be prowling around and following scents so we’re going to start seeing more bears around campgrounds and on the edge of the townsite,” said Burley.

Michel agreed.

“Every time we have a bad berry season, we will see increased bear activity ... in the Banff townsite,” he said.

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